Winner! My assemblage piece, landscape + memory, won second place in Visual Art Exchange's Scope 2017, a juried exhibition of Southern landscapes! There's an iPhone in the loaf pan looping a video of me pouring water in a stream. Also a bundle of Fuji instax photos on the bottom left of the piece.

No matter what the reviewers say, I have already gotten a lot from the process. I've reworked some images and made them better. I've drug images out of Lightroom that had not seen paper & ink previously. I've made new photographs in the last week that I love. I've reminded myself of some of my favorite work and questioned why I am not working more in that vein now. There's more. A mountain of more.

I feel like I'm falling down the rabbit hole and it just keeps getting deeper and weirder and more beautiful.

Making test prints this weekend in preparation for my first portfolio review. Trying to be brave & vulnerable & putting in the weird stuff that speaks to me. Above is "the big yes." It is a self portrait, & there are some autobiographical qualities in the story, but mostly I use myself as a model because I'm there. And I'm cheap.

The image strikes some as a dark image. There's a jokeresque quality to her expression-- the line of the mouth, the pointy nose, the arch of the eye brow... But, to me, she is saying yes to something. She looks to the train. Is that the yes? Is someone coming? Is she leaving? Does she have dark intentions? I don't know. Once the image is made, & the whisper of the story is released to the wild, there could be a thousand possible possibilities before breakfast.

For the love of all things instant and impossible, I bought myself the Impossible Project's newest camera.

For the not-yet-polaroid-nerds, the Impossible Project is the group that purchased Polaroid's last remaining instant film factory in Poland when Polaroid went out of the instant film business in 2008. The Impossible Project makes and sells film for old Polaroid cameras.

Now they've made a camera too. The I-1.

Fred and I spent last weekend on the Haw River just outside of Pittsboro, North Carolina. Photo above from last weekend on the Haw shows one of the photographs from the I-1, the I-1 camera, and a tease of the Haw in the background. One of the gifts of this process is the speed. Or lack thereof. After each shot, I put the photo in my camera bag to develop, and I take a seat on the rocks or the roots and listen to the river rushing by.

Out with my vintage polaroid camera and expired impossible film last weekend, I found magic. Exploring along the Eno River (Hillsborough, NC), we discovered this fairy castle made of sticks. I never tire of Patrick Dougherty's stickwork structures. I love this image! Soft. Irregular. Dreamy. Imperfect. Beautiful. The little white anemone-looking film spasm on the bottom right is the cherry on top.

Instant film photograph. Fuji instax film photographs are the modern Polaroid. Muted colors and soft focus lend to the charm. I love the intimacy of the small format and the lush low fidelity of the image.